zardeh (u/zardeh) - Readit News

zardeh commented on Google fixes a problem with AMP, lets you view and share publisher’s own links techcrunch.com/2017/02/06... · Posted by u/gdeglin

sly010 · 9 years ago

I meant AdWords. But I guess both.

zardeh · 9 years ago

That makes me even more curious:

what is the market share of adwords things (my understanding this is mostly going to be people offering services) that is impacted by AMP? An ecommerce site won't support AMP so won't be affected, and are news sites and blogs going to be using adwords to advertise their news and blog offerings that much?

E: (and then does it even matter if you're ads are still shown on your AMPed site so you get paid per hit?)

zardeh commented on Google fixes a problem with AMP, lets you view and share publisher’s own links techcrunch.com/2017/02/06... · Posted by u/gdeglin

sly010 · 9 years ago

> but the traffic remains the publisher’s

I bet "traffic" here means clicks counted by AdSense, so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website ;)

In any case, google is just trying to copy Facebook Instant Articles here. They want people to stay within the walls, because they realized they make more money that way.

zardeh · 9 years ago

>so you still have to pay for a click even if the user never really visited your website

Don't you mean so you get paid for a click even if the user never visited your website?

zardeh commented on Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year geekwire.com/2017/amazon-... · Posted by u/lxm

btym · 9 years ago

Yup, that's... exactly what they said.

zardeh · 9 years ago

Ah, I entirely misread that as "probably a better comparison is" instead of "than".

Whoops.

zardeh commented on Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year geekwire.com/2017/amazon-... · Posted by u/lxm

thewopr · 9 years ago

This is a really interesting comparison. Probably a better comparison than Microsoft or Google, as is done in the article.

zardeh · 9 years ago

Why? In this case, the majority of these employees are likely not in tech roles, but in various parts of the fulfillment pipeline. That makes them more similar to FedEx or Walmart.

Edit: Disregard this, I can't read.

zardeh commented on Trump Fires Acting Attorney General nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us... · Posted by u/davesque

cookiecaper · 9 years ago

>Firstly, Obama's EO's were not "illegal": they were well thought out and released only after much consultation with the DOJ to precisely ensure that such a situation does not occur.

They were illegal according to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. This has already been adjudicated. Look up Texas et al v. United States (from 2016).

>Now, we have a week-old President with no political experience rapidly firing off EO's without consulting the DOJ.

Is there a source for the claim that Mr. Trump did not consult the DoJ before issuing this EO? I haven't seen it if so. Regardless of whether Trump sought advice directly from the DoJ or not, Trump advisors have independently stated that the Order was drafted by attorneys and was the product of serious legal research and consultation (though not necessarily with or without attorneys employed by the DoJ). What's your argument here? Trump didn't use the right lawyers to help him draw up the EO? Is there some reason the president is required to use specific lawyers to assist him in drafting orders?

>And the EO's themselves seem to be unconstitutional and disrupting the lives of many people.

No, no one has presented a credible constitutional argument against the EO. The only legal arguments I've seen are related specifically to statutory, not constitutional, restrictions.

Ms. Yates herself makes no legal argument, either constitutional, procedural, or statutory. Her letter [0] contains 0 citations.

That an order is disruptive to some people has nothing to do with its legality.

>But the answer to your question is: she is more comfortable because in her opinion as a lawyer, the Immigration ban is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.

She is, of course, more than welcome to her personal opinions. However, it's extremely unprofessional to allow political proclivities to disrupt one's work.

If she could not in good conscience discharge the responsibilities of the AG, which include supporting the chief executive, the morally consistent option would've been resignation. Like the rest of the government, the DoJ is an institution that belongs to the American people, and leading it comes with an established, non-malleable set of roles and responsibilities, which include the responsibility to advise and represent the executive branch. Unless doing that would require Ms. Yates to violate her oath of office (and she doesn't claim it does), defiance is not justified.

>I don't understand why you keep going off on tangents (Obama passed illegal EO's!) instead of simply accepting the fact

It's not a tangent. Ms. Yates apparently feels the president does not have the legal authority to make orders of this nature when President Trump is in office, but that he does have the authority when President Obama is in office.

>the fact that Ms. Yates did precisely what she had sworn to do: uphold the constitution.

No, she didn't. She doesn't claim that she did. She makes no constitutional argument in support of defying the president, which she would surely be morally obligated to make if there was a credible one. She makes no legal argument of any type.

She merely states that she believes it's her responsibility to ensure the DoJ always does what's right, and apparently to her, "what's right" is based solely on her opinion and not the will of the American people based on principles of republican-democratic governance and the constitutional mechanisms that enact it in this land.

Really she seems much better suited to the private sector, where the personal opinion of the top dog is virtually as good as law. But that's not how a free government of the people and by the people works.

>Precisely. In her opinion, this IS a blatant constitutional violation.

No, there is no evidence that she believes this. There is no credible constitutional argument floating around out there (except perhaps the argument that the president has no authority to issue any EOs at all), and Ms. Yates does not claim to have one. She does not say that her oath of office obliges her to defy the president based on the competing obligation she owes to the supreme law of the land. She does not even definitively say that she thinks the order is illegal, just that it may be (because she knows it's not within her purview to decide whether specific laws are legal or not). She then announces that she will refuse to allow the DoJ to develop arguments in support of the president's position, depriving the chief executive of legal resources that are important and necessary to representing the executive branch before the judiciary. If anything, her actions will end up only prolonging the effects of Mr. Trump's order and preventing the judiciary from promptly sewing it up if it is indeed illegal.

If the constitutional violation were blatant, the judiciary would be moving rapidly to respond and support Ms. Yates's decision. That is not occurring now because there is no such justification, only media hysterics.

The judiciary recognizes that any potential legal challenge will be non-obvious and require careful evaluation and judgment after each side is given a fair hearing and the opportunity to present their arguments according to accepted legal standards and the long-established legal processes that we've set up to handle such nuanced challenges and claims.

There is nothing here, nothing at all. You're right, she knew she would be fired and that it would set off a media firestorm. She was going to be displaced next week when Senator Sessions gets confirmed and this was a way to go out in a blaze of glory and raise her public profile, perhaps launching a career as a politician in a liberal district. But I know of no legitimate argument that her conduct was anything but self-serving.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/30/us/document-L...

zardeh · 9 years ago

>It's not a tangent. Ms. Yates apparently feels the president does not have the legal authority to make orders of this nature when President Trump is in office, but that he does have the authority when President Obama is in office.

There's a very simple answer to this:

She did not believe that the Obama EO was unconstitutional, whereas she believed that this one was. Then, everything makes sense. You can rant about how "there's no credible argument", but I'm inclined to believe an Attourney General over someone on an internet forum with regards to the law.

So tell me this: what should she have done if she believed the EO, as applied, would be unconstitutional?

Edit: also the judiciary is moving swiftly, in the past two days, the EO has been practically gutted in the courts.

zardeh commented on Welcome, ACLU medium.com/ycombinator/we... · Posted by u/katm

problems · 9 years ago

I feel like you could have a good argument about most of those, but the affirmative action one is pretty damning. That's blatantly political and in no way related to constitutional protections.

There are plenty of good civil liberties related ways to look at race, but affirmative action is not one of them.

zardeh · 9 years ago

>but the affirmative action one is pretty damning

The supreme court agrees that affirmative action is constitutional (within certain bounds), see the recent Fisher v. UT case, or Bakke for the original example.

zardeh commented on Welcome, ACLU medium.com/ycombinator/we... · Posted by u/katm

fareesh · 9 years ago

I have a couple of questions here if you'll allow me to play devil's advocate.

1) Given that what Trump is doing is allowed by law - what circumstances can one imagine in which this kind of travel ban would be okay (since it's legal) or is the law itself a problem?

2) I'm curious about (1) because there are legitimate reasons why Trump's ban is more draconian than Obama's, all of which are rooted in various screw-ups by the previous administration. Those are:

a) Last year, the vetting process somehow managed to grant visas to 9500 terror linked individuals, all of whom are missing. When the visas were revoked, there was no way to locate them. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~ 2015 / 2016)

b) DHS has 40 staff members currently handling 51000 applications for credible threat to life asylum requests. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~2015)

c) Top intelligence officials have named the refugee program as a high risk attack vector (Source: CNN, ~ 2015/2016)

Under those 3 criteria alone, if you are taking over as President and you see this kind of track record from the administration, and you get this advice from the intelligence agencies, would you really be comfortable with the visas issued thus far?

I sort of agree with the principle in theory that if the government has granted someone the right to enter, they ought to be allowed to enter, but that's never really been an airtight thing either. Your final entry is always conditioned upon being interviewed at the airport and getting your passport stamped, and answering various questions - where will you be staying, for how long, etc. etc. I suspect it would have been more principled to have a comprehensive screening process for people when they landed, but that may be an operational nightmare.

Given that there are plenty of PhD students, guest workers, etc. from Iran mostly, who are immensely inconvenienced by this kind of draconian rule, I am not entirely in favor of the policy. At the same time I'm curious as to whether a President is really dutybound to stand by the visas issued by the previous administration when there is proof of this sort of incompetence / error in the process at this magnitude (i.e. nearly ten thousand).

zardeh · 9 years ago

>Last year, the vetting process somehow managed to grant visas to 9500 terror linked individuals, all of whom are missing. When the visas were revoked, there was no way to locate them. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~ 2015 / 2016)

No, since 2001, 9500 "terror linked individuals" were given visas. Unfortunately, I can't find any explanation of what "terror linked" means in this context. Each year, the US grants approximately 8-9 million visas. So, in 15 years, across over 100 million issued visas, approximately 10,000 may have been given to individuals who were "terror linked", where that could mean "confirmed terrorist", or it could mean "their uncle once went to a market that we believe is a known terrorist hotspot". Again, there's no explanation, anywhere, of what "terror linked individual" means in this context.

Please stop editorializing.

zardeh commented on Trump Fires Acting Attorney General nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us... · Posted by u/davesque

TenOhms · 9 years ago

What I find worrying is she ordered that the DOJ not support the President without any clear conviction that the law was unconstitutional, it smelled of an entirely politically motivated action not grounded in US law.

zardeh · 9 years ago

That's interesting. I totally see this as a valid argument (and I don't disagree that this might be politically motivated on the judge's part). However, it seems to me that

>any clear conviction that the law was unconstitutional

is the wrong way of going about it. I would think you'd want to be pretty darn sure that the actions you were carrying out were constitutional before doing them. That is, I'd much rather people not enforce a law that might be unconstitutional, but isn't, than enforce a law that is unconstitutional. Err on the side of caution.

zardeh commented on Ask HN: Is it ok that founders are taking to social media about politics? · Posted by u/vilified_throw

wyager · 9 years ago

I think this argument is nothing more than a dirty tactic to guilt people into supporting a cause. People are allowed to be ambivalent about things. People are allowed to recognize that they don't have enough information to form an opinion. People are even allowed not to care.

zardeh · 9 years ago

And they are allowed to be vilified for their ambivalence. Saying "I don't care" doesn't absolve you of any guilt.

zardeh commented on Python project template with a convenient Makefile-facility and helpers github.com/alexkey/cookie... · Posted by u/alexkey

laingc · 9 years ago

Nice idea, but does this offer anything over and above the well-supported and functional pyscaffold? [0]

[0] https://pyscaffold.readthedocs.io/en/v2.5.7/

zardeh · 9 years ago

Well, cookiecutter came first, has a huge library of supported templates, and works across multiple languages.